Ashes in the Snow (2018)
★★½ — Ashes in the Snow (2018)
Ashes in the Snow is adapted from Ruta Sepetys's 2011 young adult novel Between Shades of Gray (not to be confused with the rather different Fifty Shades of Grey), a book that brought considerable international attention to the Soviet mass deportations of Baltic civilians that began in June 1941. Lithuanian-American director Marius Markevicius had previously made the basketball documentary The Other Dream Team (2012), a well-received festival film about the Lithuanian national team at the 1992 Olympics, making this fictional feature something of a tonal departure. The production was a Lithuanian-American co-operation, filmed largely on location in Lithuania, and arrived at a moment of renewed public interest in Soviet-era atrocities in the Baltic states. Bel Powley, already known for her breakout performance in The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015), leads the cast alongside Norwegian actress Lisa Loven Kongsli.
A-Z World Movie Tour Lithuania I went into Ashes in the Snow expecting a story. What I got was a punch to the gut and a history lesson I didn’t know I was missing. Set during Stalin’s brutal deportation of Lithuanians to Siberia and the Altai region, this film pulls no punches in depicting the sheer horror of Soviet-era repression. It follows 16-year-old Lina and her family as they’re ripped from their home, thrown onto cattle trains, and sent to a labor camp where survival is a daily miracle. The cold isn’t just weather, it’s a character. A relentless, bone-deep force that strips away warmth, hope, and eventually, life itself. What makes this so powerful is how grounded it feels. No melodrama, no over-the-top speeches, just ordinary people enduring the unimaginable. You feel every rationed spoonful of soup, every frostbitten toe, every whispered prayer for escape. The cinematography captures both the stark beauty and the suffocating bleakness of Siberia, the kind of place where even the sun looks like it regrets being there. And yet, amid all the suffering, there’s defiance. Lina sketches her world in secret, documenting the atrocities with charcoal and stolen scraps of paper. Her art becomes an act of rebellion, a way to say, “We were here. We mattered.” It’s sickening (and tragically necessary) to be reminded of what the USSR did to Lithuania and the other Baltic states. This wasn’t war. This wasn’t justice. This was state-sponsored erasure. Over 130,000 Lithuanians were taken. 70% were women and children. Many never came back. And yet… how many of us knew this before watching a movie? That’s the real crime, not just the camps, but the silence that followed.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 2018 | Watched: 2025-07-12
Where to watch (UK)
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Physical: Amazon UK
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